'Steve Jobs,' by Walter Isaacson: review

BIOGRAPHY

Dan Zigmond, Special to The Chronicle

Published
4:00 am PST, Sunday, November 6, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO - SEPTEMBER 05: Apple CEO Steve Jobs is silhouetted by a video screen as he shows a new iPod video during an Apple Special event September 5, 2007 in San Francisco, California. Jobs announced a new generation of iPods as well as a partnership with Starbucks to access music being played at Starbucks coffee shops with the new iPod Touch.

SAN FRANCISCO - SEPTEMBER 05: Apple CEO Steve Jobs is silhouetted by a video screen as he shows a new iPod video during an Apple Special event September 5, 2007 in San Francisco, California. Jobs announced a

SAN FRANCISCO - SEPTEMBER 05: Apple CEO Steve Jobs is silhouetted by a video screen as he shows a new iPod video during an Apple Special event September 5, 2007 in San Francisco, California. Jobs announced a new generation of iPods as well as a partnership with Starbucks to access music being played at Starbucks coffee shops with the new iPod Touch.

SAN FRANCISCO - SEPTEMBER 05: Apple CEO Steve Jobs is silhouetted by a video screen as he shows a new iPod video during an Apple Special event September 5, 2007 in San Francisco, California. Jobs announced a

By Walter Isaacson

(Simon & Schuster; 630 pages; $35)

How to explain our fascination with Steve Jobs? His death last month triggered an outpouring of public grief at a scale usually reserved for beloved presidents, princesses and rock stars. At a time when business elites are the subject of mass protests around the world, the passing of Apple's billionaire chief executive became something of a global tragedy.

Walter Isaacson's timely authorized biography will probably contribute to this obsession rather than explain it. (A convenience store near Jobs' house has copies piled up by the cash register amid the cigarettes and Halloween candy.) But for those curious about this iconic figure - which in the past month has seemed to include just about everyone - "Steve Jobs" provides an irresistible glimpse into his complex and often contradictory life.

By now the outline of Jobs' story will be familiar to many readers. Born in San Francisco in 1955 and immediately put up for adoption, he came of age in the early days of Silicon Valley, a place where "even the ne'er-do-wells tended to be engineers." His parents indulged his passion for electronics and general tinkering, and promised his birth mother to send him to college, but there he lasted less than a year. He discovered Baba Ram Dass' "Be Here Now" and experimented with LSD, then soon returned to the Bay Area and took a job with the seminal video game entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell at Atari.

Jobs saved enough money for a half-year pilgrimage to India, and seriously considered moving to Japan to train as a Buddhist monk. But his Los Altos Zen master, the late Kobun Chino Otogawa, persuaded him to stay in Silicon Valley, where he founded Apple Computer instead.

Isaacson, whose prior work includes biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, describes the birth of Apple in brisk, inviting prose, capturing a tale no less entertaining for being frequently told. He particularly excels at capturing the unique "cultural currents" that flowed through Silicon Valley in those heady days:

"There was the technology revolution that began with the growth of military contractors and soon included electronics firms, microchip makers, video game designers, and computer companies. There was a hacker subculture - filled with wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks - that included engineers who didn't conform to the HP mold and their kids who weren't attuned to the wavelengths of the subdivisions. ... There was the hippie movement, born out of the Bay Area's beat generation, and the rebellious political activists, born out of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Overlaid on it all were the various self-fulfillment movements pursuing paths to personal enlightenment: Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est."

The initial Apple I led to the popular Apple II, and ultimately to the Macintosh, the revolutionary computer Jobs unveiled to great fanfare in 1984. But by then, Jobs' winning streak was already coming to a close. The "insanely great" Macintosh was not the runaway commercial success that Apple's first computers had been, and Jobs' "mercurial personality and erratic treatment of people" caused his ouster from the Macintosh team in 1985. He left Apple within a few months to try again.

There have been many struggling second acts in Silicon Valley. Jobs' life after Apple seemed for a while to follow this pattern, with his second company, NeXT, never achieving anything close to the stature of his first. Had his story ended there, Jobs' place in the history of computing would still have been assured, but with no more importance than that of a dozen or two other pioneers. It was Jobs' third act - his return to Apple - that truly set him apart.

But here Isaacson, like all biographers, is faced with the fact that reality does not have a plot. Our lives break all the rules of good storytelling: There are too many tangents, characters inexplicably appear and disappear, and the pacing, far too often, is all wrong. These challenges begin to catch up with Isaacson in the second half of the book, just as Jobs' career moves from the merely extraordinary to the genuinely unprecedented.

What had been a mostly linear narrative of Jobs growing up and founding Apple inevitably begins to splinter. Chapters on Jobs' romantic encounters and later family life sit somewhat uncomfortably in the middle of the book, breaking what had been a more strict chronological flow. Isaacson's somewhat cursory treatment of the animation studio Pixar, beginning with Jobs' purchase of the division from Lucasfilm, feels similarly misplaced. It is hard enough to keep track of everyone at Apple without also having to remember the staff at Pixar and the sad corporate shenanigans at Disney.

Isaacson seems more at home describing Jobs' eventual triumphs back at Apple, after selling NeXT to the company in 1996. We proceed step-by-step through the development of the now-famous progression of i-products that saved Apple from the brink of insolvency: the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Watching Jobs and his lieutenants bring forth that improbable string of hits is a real treat. Isaacson wisely devotes much of the last third of his book to this astoundingly successful second stint at Apple, surely one of the great corporate turnarounds of all time.

Jobs admits to Isaacson in one of the last of their many interviews that "I know there will be a lot in your book I won't like." That is undoubtedly true. The later chapters on Jobs' declining health can make for painful reading. There is something unsettling about seeing the intimate details of this immensely private man in print so soon after his death. Yet Isaacson has managed to write a book that is unflinching but not unflattering. He heralds Jobs' mastery at "putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future," while admitting the "nasty edge to his personality," presenting us a man with an inspired "quest for perfection," but one whose "Zen training never quite produced in him a Zen-like calm."

The Silicon Valley that Jobs left behind was not the same one he discovered as a boy. Jobs judged today's newcomers more "materialistic and careerist" than he had ever been, without the "idealistic wind of the sixties" propelling them toward the dreamy optimism that led Jobs, at times, to fall victim to his own "reality distortion field." Jobs' cherished valley has developed an intricate support structure that seems to spawn an unending stream of new startups, but few still share his devotion to art as an essential ingredient in technology, and even fewer his hard-earned respect for psychedelic drugs.

The "wilderness decade" away from Apple clearly tested Jobs' faith. His first company's seemingly inexorable decline, combined with the very tepid success of his second, and perhaps most of all, the birth of his children, seemed for a time to temper his fervor for technology. "We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die," he explained in a 1995 interview with Wired magazine. "Technology is not changing it much - if at all."

Isaacson's book doesn't reveal if Jobs still believed those words in 2011, as his own brief instant was coming to a close. Jobs could not transcend the great truth of birth and death, but he did transform a world "filled with junky devices, inscrutable error messages, and annoying interfaces" into one with at least a handful of "astonishing products marked by beguiling user experiences ... as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved."

Reflecting on his own impending death, Jobs told Isaacson, "I really want to believe that something survives." And after Isaacson has brought us closer to this remarkable man, one who changed the way we connect to computers, phones, music and perhaps even each other, readers will hope something of Steve Jobs survives, too.

Dan Zigmond is a contributing editor at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. E-mail comments to books@sfchronicle.com.